We’ve loved Pandora for years. Perhaps we forgot about her and moved onto new friends, like Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon.

But can she now bounce back with a $3.5 billion investment? That’s the question many asked Monday, in the wake of Sirius XM’s proposed purchase of the struggling Pandora music service, one of the oldest Internet brands, dating back to the early oughts.

A comeback seems doubtful – just ask AOL and Yahoo how that’s going? But stranger things have happened – Apple was once left for dead, remember, before Steve Jobs returned in the 1990s and helped engineer one of the greatest corporate revivals ever.

We all love free music. So what if YouTube’s new Music service does a better job of identifying our likes and dislikes, based on our Google search history? Or if more people have gotten used to the Spotify interface?

Pandora was there first. We know it. It’s easy to use. We have a history with Pandora.

Announced Monday, the merger puts the smaller, but wealthier Sirius, which has just over 30 million paying subscribers, as the new owner of Pandora, home to 70 million active mostly ad-supported listeners.

Pandora has long been popular with listeners as a place to hear free music, but not on demand. Instead, you could pick a song or artist and create radio stations based on them, with only a handful of songs based on your picks during the hour, due to copyright laws.

On-demand listening, like on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, became the format of choice, in more recent years. For a monthly fee you could choose to listen to “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Amazing Grace,” on a moment’s notice. Spotify, the most popular music service, has over 80 million paying subscribers.

But Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities says that many of us forget that not everyone has $10 monthly to spread around. “A free service is a better deal for so many people,” he says.

Pandora also has a $9.99 monthly on-demand service, Pandora Premium, which is 4th in a 4-way race led by Spotify, Apple and Amazon, Pachter says.

Sirius XM is all about selling subscriptions to listen to Howard Stern and stations based on genres like 70s, 80s and 90s, and for those who want on-demand music, “now Sirius can cross sell a Spotify clone,” he says. “It’s a winning combination.”

Pandora’s biggest issue has been its double-edged sword. It is under contract to the record labels in paying higher copyright fees than on-demand outlets, and thus, the more listeners it gets, the more money it has to pay out. Pachter says Pandora has lost over $100 million in 2017 and 2016 due to sky high royalty rates.

If the deal goes through, he expects Sirius to re-negotiate terms with the labels.

Daniel Sanchez, a reporter for the Digital Music News blog, thinks it’s doubtful Pandora can snap back. “It’s been bleeding money and listeners for years,” he says,.

He believes Sirius is buying it to beef up the company as an audio powerhouse, and will probably just fold Pandora into the mix at some point in the near future.